Ozzie Sport

This post continues to look at the historical activity level of AFL fans on Yahoo!Groups.  This time, the focus is on the North Melbourne Kangaroos.

If you look at the North Melbourne Kangaroos category on Yahoo!Groups, you will find ten groups.  Of these, six of these are actually dedicated to the team.  They are northmelbournekangaroos, themightyrooboys, nmfc, mightyrooboys, northkangaroosclub and thenorthmelbournefc.  With the exception of themightyrooboys which was created in 1999, all the lists were created in 2000.  The average total membership membership is 24.  The lists all have open membership and have an ongoing spam problem.

I looked at the lists to determine when these lists had legitimate posting, added up the monthly totals across all six lists and generated the following chart:

The community was at its most active when it started.  There were two small season drops during the off season with the community all but disappearing after the 2002 campaign.  This some what resembles the pattern for the Essendon Bombers, though that community had more overall activity and a more extreme drop off in posting.  It looks like this particular service was never embraced by fans of the team as one of their early means of communicating.

In order to find out legitimate posting periods for nmfc, I had to join the list.  The list has 35 members at the moment. On topic posts to the list ended in January 2002.  Spam posting started in August 2004.  I decided to get membership demographics for the list since membership gave me access to a member list.  Of the 35 members, only one listed their age or gender (57, female) and no one listed their location.  (She joined during a period of legitimate posting.) Of the 35 members, thirteen or 37% joined during the period of legitimate posting.  Four members or 11% joined in the period where there was no posting.  Eighteen members or 51% joined during the period of only spam posting.  That’s a big problem for any sort of attempts to revive the list.  It is also a big problem for Yahoo!Groups and could explain why people who love mailing lists eschew their service.  It also makes it hard to legitimately get demographic data off the service, unless the assumption is made that all people joining after the period of spam content are actually spammers and their demographic data can be ignored.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• The AFL on Yahoo!Groups
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)

When I was compiling the list of Twitter accounts for the ANZ Championship, I found several Australian netball team Twitter related accounts, including ones for Australian Diamonds, Petersham RUFC Netball Club, ACE Netball Club, Orcas Netball.  I got details regarding the total number of followers, checked totals on Facebook and compared these to the ANZ teams.  The following table was generated:

Australian Netball on Facebook and Twitter

For the smaller club teams that are more about participation, there just is not a Facebook interest in them.  This is not surprising as listing a team you participate in recreationally might seem odd; you’re not a fan but a player and the team isn’t professional or top level so it is unlikely others will want to find you as a result of your participation.  At least two of those teams have a Facebook presence to share news but this is not enough to get people to list these teams as an interest.

Beyond the clubs listed, there are some regional accounts for those interested in Australian netball.  They include @NetballAust – Netball Australia (72 followers), @Sydney_Netball – Sydney and New South Wales netball news from a newspaper (31 followers), and @netballvic – Netball Victoria (20 followers).

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (November 7)

I’ve spent the past two hours or so culling through various netball related Twitter lists, checking lists that included ANZ Championship teams and players.  After having done that, it looks like five teams have a Twitter presence:  Adelaide Thunderbirds, Melbourne Vixens, New South Wales Swifts, Queensland Firebirds, and West Coast Fever.  For the Thunderbirds, there are two accounts: @AdelaideTBirds and @NatTbirds.  The first is a team account and the second is the personal account of a player.  The Vixens similarly have two accounts, one for the team and a player with a personal account: @MelbourneVixens and @SharelleVixens.  The same situation exists for the New South Wales Swifts: @nswswifts and @SusanSwifts.  For the Queensland Firebirds and West Coast Fever, single players have accounts but the teams do not appear to have an official Twitter presence: @laurafirebirds and @SusanWCFever.

For the team accounts, the Thunderbirds have 62 followers, the Vixens have 904 followers and the Swifts have 90 followers.  This puts the average at 352 followers per team because the 904 skews the numbers really high.  If that is excluded, the average is 76.  For player accounts, the average number of followers is 208.8.  The highest number is 400, for the Vixens player.  The lowest is 66 for the West Coast Fever player.  These numbers are comparable to several of the A-League related Twitter accounts.

Using Twitter Analyzer, the location of the followers of these accounts was determined and the following table was generated:

ANZ Championship on Twitter

The West Coast Fever (represented by their Tweeting player) had the smallest Australian audience and the Melbourne Vixens had the largest percentage Australian audience.  I still believe these numbers are questionably reliable, that people are lying about their location of that there is a huge problem with spam followers on Twitter.  Why?  The Melbourne Vixens have 9 followers from Greenland.   Googling for Greenland and Netball doesn’t bring up any information about sport in the country.  Given that, it doesn’t make sense that the Vixens would have that huge of a following from the country.

If you’re interested in following ANZ Championship teams and players on Twitter, I’ve created a Twitter list @ozziesport/anzchampionship.

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)